ARTS & CULTURE

 

Design tweaks can't overcome Academy Museum's dramatic flaws

Critic's Notebook: Small design tweaks from the Piano-Pali team can't overcome the disconnection that radiates from the clumsy domed exterior of the academy's planned film museum.

 

A rendering of the planned film academy museum, as seen from Fairfax Avenue. (©Renzo Piano Building Workshop/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences / March 19, 2014)

For Kerry Brougher, newly named director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' planned film museum, the bubble may be nothing compared with the spaceship.
Brougher comes to the academy from the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., where one of his first tests as interim director was dealing with fallout from a failed proposal to install a $15-million inflatable bubble in the museum's circular courtyard.
In Los Angeles, Brougher will inherit a new architectural challenge: what do with a major building project that isn't in danger of being scrapped, as the bubble was, but has significant, even fundamental design flaws.
The academy hopes to break ground by the end of the year on a $300-million museum at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Designed by Renzo Piano and the L.A. architect Zoltan Pali, it will remake the interior of the May Co. department store as a museum of Hollywood history.

It will also add a 1,000-seat dome-shaped theater, a structure Piano calls "the spaceship," to the back of the 1939 landmark.
If Brougher and other academy leaders can compel the architects to reconcile the clear potential of the new wing's interior spaces with its unconvincing, unwieldy exterior, they may be able to salvage the design before construction begins.
If not, they may well have an architectural flop on their hands when the museum opens in 2017 — not to mention the third disappointing Piano building within a quarter-mile radius.
The Hirshhorn bubble, designed by the architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, was proposed as a kind of architectural folly that would be inflated only a few weeks every year. The Academy Museum, with a budget 20 times larger, is slated for prominent intersection on Wilshire Boulevard that will include a Metro subway stop within a decade.
It will tell the story of how the movie business developed (and by extension how it helped shape Los Angeles). It ought to rival Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall as one of the most significant pieces of 21st-century architecture in Southern California.

What the academy is preparing to build is several rungs below that level. Its architectural centerpiece, the spherical theater wing, is an oversized bauble that looks as if it's just touching down for a short stay. As a piece of urban design the theater is trapped in a kind of retro-futuristic limbo, with little to say about contemporary Los Angeles.
Piano and the academy share a clear interest in making sure the project doesn't repeat the errors (or even the formal vocabulary) of the architect's recent buildings for LACMA, a pair of travertine-wrapped boxes practically in the shadow of the May Co.
The first to open, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, is among the least assured of Piano's many museum projects. The second, the Resnick Pavilion, is slightly better but still a far cry from Piano's art-world masterpieces, the main gallery building at the Menil Collection in Houston and the Beyeler Foundation Museum near Basel, Switzerland.
Piano's desire to redeem himself in Los Angeles after his LACMA misadventure is understandable. But it's driven him to produce a misguided attempt at tourist-friendly architecture and one of the more strained designs of his long career.
Before he began comparing it to a spaceship, Piano described the spherical building, which will be clad in aluminum panels, as a soap bubble and a "planetarium of cinema." He has said he was inspired by pictures of the blimps that once flew from this part of Los Angeles; the 1963 Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard, by Welton Becket and Associates, is another clear precedent.

Propped up on a pair of stilts as it faces north, Piano's theater looks less like a blimp or an update of Becket than a snub-nosed helmet — or a sleek, giant albino Pac-Man gobbling up the red carpet that stretches north beneath it toward 6th Street.
Several of the interior spaces promise to be more compelling. Part of the ground floor of the May Co. building will be dramatically cut away to reveal a theater at basement level.
Visitors who arrive for a screening or premiere, rather than to tour the museum, will take stairs or escalators to enter the dome. Or they'll continue higher to a vast event space at the top of the new wing, beneath a huge glass canopy, offering views of the Hollywood Hills. The theater itself, wrapped in a concrete shell, will be among the most technically advanced in the country.

 

Spring arts 2014: Dance

Los Angeles Ballet, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Jessica Lang Dance and more.

It's a full spring dance season, with national and international companies heading into town, a trend that continues well into summer. For the next three months, "diversity" is one watchword, with flamenco, contemporary ballet, modern dance and neo-classical masterpieces being presented around the region. Companies that qualify as American treasures will be well represented too, with Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey and Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo performing. New York's Tere O'Connor will be bringing two new pieces to the Skirball Cultural Center in April, while a newer Big Apple group, the much-talked-about Jessica Lang Dance, makes its first appearance here in late May.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Ballet presents its eighth repertory season and premieres two commissioned works, including one from Christopher Stowell, a former principal dancer with San Francisco Ballet. Other local companies are busy raising money so they can self-present themselves. And stay tuned for news about Dance Camera West, June 6-8, which will combine dance film and live performances.

 

Theater review: 'Five Mile Lake' at South Coast Repertory flows nicely 

 

Among the revivals and West Coast premieres that dominate our theatrical offerings, the startling phrase “world premiere” implies an exhilarating, possibly risky novelty: You can’t help expecting pyrotechnics.
But Rachel Bonds’ “Five Mile Lake,” receiving its world premiere at South Coast Repertory, is a small, quiet play in which nothing particularly momentous happens.
In fact, you may forget you’re watching a play at all, and that the people in whose every fleeting expression you have become so deeply absorbed are actors reciting memorized lines.
Mary (Rebecca Mozo) and Jamie (Nate Mooney) work at a small coffee shop in their (fictional) Pennsylvania hometown. It’s the kind of town kids grow up to leave, but these two, in their late 20s, didn’t.

Mary has a troubled older brother, an Afghanistan veteran she’s trying to rehabilitate (Brian Slaten); Jamie looks after his ailing mother. But while Mary, dreamy and ambitious, feels stifled and resentful, Jamie radiates contentment, teasing her affectionately as she glares at him.
“Don’t you ever get claustrophobic?” she demands. “No. Because I live on a giant lake,” he replies.
Jamie’s lake is literal — a backdrop on Marion Williams’ attractive set — and metaphorical: Its source is his unrequited love for Mary.
Of course something drops in to ruffle its surface. His brother, Rufus (Corey Brill), who has been away for years earning a doctorate, suddenly arrives, bringing a glamorous girlfriend, Peta (Nicole Shalhoub). But things aren't perfect for the two of them. And Rufus, unlike dogged, principled Jamie, is a star: charismatic, complicated and glib. To Mary, who had a crush on him in high school, Rufus is the one who got away.
It’s easy to imagine how the scenario would unspool in another type of play: Two brothers divided by their love for one woman. “Five Mile Lake” contains all that passion, betrayal, violence and heartbreak in the pauses between words. There are no gunshots or shouting matches — and nobody even drowns in the lake. (Somebody does dive in, in a melodramatic sequence that doesn't quite work.) Only subtly does Jamie emerge as a hero who accepts what life has given him and quietly works to improve it.

Bonds, a rising East Coast playwright, has a gift for quotidian dialogue with a deep well of subtext. It doesn’t really sound like dialogue. It sounds like the way people talk. Rather than announcing “I want to spend time with you” or “I’m jealous that you spent time with my brother,” her characters ask, as any of us might, “Do you want some gummy worms?” or “So you and Rufus are like best friends now?”
This is hardly a new playwriting strategy: Bonds’ most obvious antecedent is Chekhov; in very different cultural contexts, both writers create characters who helplessly reveal their innermost yearnings even, or especially, when they try not to. This type of writing is a gift for actors, because the conflict between what they say and what they feel is inherently theatrical. On the other hand, only extraordinary actors can pull it off.
A great deal of credit for these five lucid, persuasive performances belongs to director Daniella Topol. Only meticulous attention to pace, body language and facial expressions could result in such miraculous naturalism.
Brill and Mozo deliver lengthy monologues, the sort of set pieces that so often feel stagy but don't here  because both actors appear to be speaking these particular words for the first time. For this accomplishment, “Five Mile Lake” lives up to all the expectations that accompany a world premiere.

 

San Diego Opera extends deadline for closing down after board exodus

San Diego Opera set a new deadline of May 19 to obtain new funding or close down after the resignation Thursday of 13 members of its board of directors, including President Karen Cohn.
The new deadline will give the reconstituted board time to raise money to keep the company alive -- though what form it might take is uncertain.
Under discussion at Thursday's meeting was a motion that stated in part that "additional information has come to the attention of the board regarding the prospects of new funding."
Ian Campbell, the opera's embattled general and artistic director, is still officially the company's leader. Campbell has been criticized for his role in advocating the shutdown.
Cohn walked out of the gathering, which lasted more than four hours. A dozen others also resigned. The opera's board previously numbered close to 60 members.
Cohn had been a proponent of closing the company and had repeatedly cited significant financial obstacles to the opera's survival.
The previous deadline for closure was April 29.
Carol Lazier, the new acting board president, said in a statement on Friday that she was "deeply encouraged" by public support for the opera.
"We have a devoted staff, an energized association and a board newly focused on finding novel and fiscally responsible ways to present great opera to the city of San Diego," she said.
Lazier is donating $1 million to help the company remain afloat.
The company said it was being assisted in its efforts by Opera America, the New York-based nonprofit organization that supports opera and other musical arts around the country.

 

Billionaire Developer Lures Wealthy Chinese to Gated Polo Community 

 

Pan Sutong proudly displays the 4.5-liter jeroboam of 1900 Chateau Latour he uncorked on Dec. 8 after his two thoroughbreds placed first and second in their respective races at the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
Over a lunch prepared by his personal chef of mussels with lobster jelly, wild salmon with carrot-and-caviar puree and lamb wrapped with Parma ham, Pan describes the lifestyle he’s packaging for China’s elite, based on fast horses, haute cuisine and fine wine.
It’s taking shape at Fortune Heights, Bloomberg Pursuits will report in its Spring 2014 issue -- an ultraexclusive gated community in the city of Tianjin, a 35-minute bullet-train ride from Beijing. Its 64 mansions will have cellars stocked with first-growth Bordeaux, gold-plated shower heads and commanding views of emerald polo grounds, Pan says.

 Anchored by the Tianjin Goldin Metropolitan Polo Club, the villas are part of a $5 billion, 89-hectare (220-acre) development that’s expected to include a 117-story office tower that has risen to almost half its planned height, an upscale shopping mall, a Las Vegas–style theater, a convention center and dozens of apartment blocks, four of which are nearly sold out.

 

“I’m not satisfied with three Michelin stars or Robert Parker’s 100 points,” Pan says. “We want to put everything that is high-end into one community, where horses are front and center.” China is minting more millionaires than any other emerging economy, according to the 2013 Asia-Pacific Wealth Report from Capgemini and RBC Wealth Management, which puts their ranks at 643,000, up 14.3 percent from 2012.

Turnkey Sophistication

Property developers in China have been building pricey villas overlooking golf courses for decades; now, by replacing fairways with the Kentucky bluegrass of polo fields, Pan is introducing the country’s nouveaux riches to a whole new level of turnkey sophistication.
“He has a certain savoir-faire that differentiates him from people who have only money,” says Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, chief executive officer of the Hong Kong Jockey Club. “He wants to create an experience that is not only a property but a lifestyle.”
It’s a lifestyle that’s part Donald Trump, part British aristocracy. Pan’s Gulfstream G550 jets him to homes in Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles and Tianjin, where he’s building a 6,500-square-meter (70,000-square-foot) mansion that’s bigger than Candyland, the late Aaron Spelling’s former 5,100-square-meter house in L.A. And he hobnobs with princes Harry and William at a charity polo match he sponsors at England’s exclusive Beaufort Polo Club each June.

 

Polo Club 

 

The furnishings headed for his Tianjin manse may be faux Louis XV, but the polo club it overlooks is the real deal. “The general facilities are outstanding, and not many sporting clubs in the world are more elegant,” Richard Caleel, president of the Federation of International Polo said by telephone from Santa Barbara, California.
It’s stocked with more than 200 top-of-the-line ponies from Argentina and Australia, and each January, the club stages the Snow Polo World Cup, which fields top international teams. At last year’s event, Pan flew in opera singers from Buenos Aires, offered a course called “Deconstructing Molecular Gastronomy” and treated guests to a tasting of wines from Chateau Haut-Brion, one of only five Bordeaux estates with the top premier cru classification.
Pan, 51, never even made it past high school. Born in Shaoguan, in Guangdong province, he was brought up by his paternal grandmother in Guangzhou until her death from cancer when he was 13, at which point he moved to San Marino, California, to live with his stepgrandmother.

Skipping School

He spent most of his time skipping school and hanging out in the family’s chain of Chinese restaurants, so he never learned to speak much English. After five years, he moved to Hong Kong and, with a loan from his family, set up a business dealing in Japanese electronics.
Ten years later, he moved into manufacturing in southern China, eventually commanding 90 percent of China’s production of karaoke monitors through his Matsunichi Communication Holdings Ltd. In 2002, Pan listed the company (since renamed Goldin Properties Holdings Ltd.) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Five years later, he branched out into real estate when he acquired the Tianjin parcel. As of mid-March, his controlling stakes in Goldin Properties and its sister company, Goldin Financial Holdings Ltd., were worth some $2.8 billion.

First Winery

Three years ago, Pan bought his first winery, paying $50 million for Sloan Estate, a Rutherford, California, producer of Bordeaux-style reds whose most recent vintage, the 2009, sells for $367 a bottle.
Last April, Pan snapped up Chateau Le Bon Pasteur from one of Bordeaux’s foremost winemaking families, along with Chateau Rolland-Maillet in St.-Emilion and Chateau Bertineau St.-Vincent in Lalande de Pomerol.
More acquisitions are planned. “We are aggressively still in investment mode,” says Jenny Pan, his 26-year-old daughter, who took over the running of Sloan after a two-year stint working in wealth management at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York. “The Bordeaux and Sloan vineyards are only the first few in a hundred-step journey to build up our business.”
As Chinese President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption enters its second year, conspicuous consumption of Patek Philippe watches and Louis Vuitton handbags is still frowned upon, something that makes Pan’s offering of a discreet lifestyle behind closed doors appealing.

‘Less Ostentatious’

“People are moving towards a less ostentatious display of wealth,” says Michael Klibaner, regional head of research at real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. in Hong Kong.
Though Klibaner finds the idea of a polo club “a bit gimmicky,” he says it’s a smart alternative at a time when China has imposed a ban on building any more golf courses.
William Lin, a Tianjin-based Internet entrepreneur and the first Chinese member to take up polo at the club, says the limited popularity of the game isn’t the point.
“Most people who buy apartments here won’t play but will like a lifestyle where they can watch out the window,” he says. “As the Chinese make more money, they will need to know which kind of high-class lifestyle they should follow.”

 

Passover: Child’s Play?

Posted by Bernard Avishai

 

 

About a year before he died, in the fall of 2000, I attended a reading on the Upper West Side of Manhattan by the great Jerusalem poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the week before Passover, in a not-really-filled synagogue basement hall—intimate enough for him to lapse into a recollection of the bedikat hametz, the search for crumbs of bread and such, in his childhood home in Würzburg, Germany, on the morning before the seder.
Jews are forbidden to eat leavened bread on the eight days of the holiday. Ashkenazi rabbis, presumably pleasing God by outdoing Him, interpreted this to mean no contact at all with leavened foods of any kind (including, alas, beer) or even grains, like rice and legumes, that swell up in water. So the morning before the seder, Amichai said, he and his father would prowl around the house searching for forbidden stuff, a feather in hand, blowing into corners, and sweeping up the dust balls, looking hopefully for crumbs. The piles would be slowly nudged together and added to leftover bread. Then the whole lot would be taken outside and burned in a newspaper. Amichai’s father would chant exotic Aramaic words, feather still in hand, asking to be forgiven for any crumbs still lying around, potentially despoiling the kashrut—the purity and fitness—of the home. Amichai looked at the audience wistfully. “Child’s play,” he said.

Childhood memory is often indelible, but historical memory is potentially lost with every new child. The point of not eating bread—Passover is all about making points—is the transmission of a great ethical claim to each new generation. Jews are enjoined to dramatize for their children the preciousness of freedom by ritualizing how quickly our ancestors seized theirs, escaping Pharaoh’s slave pits: so quickly that their bread did not have time to rise. The point here is not to refuse bread the way Jews who observe ordinary kashrut laws refuse, say, milk with meat. (Those ordinary laws encourage awe before the divine by prohibiting something arbitrary, and, in a way, the more arbitrary the better; were it not for “the Law,” Maimonides writes, eating milk with meat “would not at all be considered a transgression.”) No, the point on Passover is the positive act of eating unleavened bread, matzot, to emphasize the good of freedom.
And yet Amichai knew better than to leave things there. Children aren’t so crazy in the end about the uncertainty that comes with getting their way. They need games, rules to conform to (the banning of all bread products for eight days) and incantations to assure forgiveness (the prayers that accompany cleaning the house), sensuous pleasure and pageantry (the intricate rituals of the seder). Children—Amichai can’t just say this, but can imply it—are cute little Fascists. They’ll take the father over the freedom anytime:

I shriek like a child, feet swinging on high:
I want down, Daddy, I want down,
Daddy, get me down.
And that’s how the saints all ascend to heaven,
like a child screaming, Daddy, I want to stay up here,
Daddy, don’t get me down, Our Father Our King,
leave us up here, Our Father Our King!

(From “Open Closed Open: Poems”)

So all the rituals of Passover—what Amichai calls child’s play—do not necessarily communicate the notion of freedom they were devised to transmit. The play can become more uncannily precious than the ideas it is meant to put across. Better to have the smells of the seder meal filling the senses than disturbing ideas about bondage and release into the desert filling the talk; better to be a good Jew than a Jew worrying about how to be good. Moses himself learned this the hard way. When he ascended Mount Sinai to search out ethical grandeur, the Children of Israel, left to themselves, built an idol to worship. Hell, they were prepared to return to Egypt for a taste of the garlic they craved. They couldn’t handle the desert’s boundlessness.
I am thinking about Amichai this morning, before Passover, because I’ve noticed a new conceit this year on Reshet Bet, Israel’s dominant radio station. Almost all the broadcasters signed off with the phrase “pesach kasher,” a kosher Passover, something you did not hear in Israel a generation ago (and I have not heard since Talmud Torah, the orthodox school I went to in Montreal, in the nineteen-fifties). Guests speak about where the line in Europe passed between sweet gefilte fish and the salty kind. One rabbi, to his credit, spoke of the importance of complicating the intimacy of the family meal by remembering the refugees of the Syrian civil war and from sub-Saharan Africa, though he did not suggest what could be done about them. Not one interviewer asked about the universal importance of political freedom. (Is there even any point in asking why nobody thought to invite a Palestinian resident of Ramallah, you know, to ask what it felt like to be denied the most obvious forms of it?)
Presumably, the radio celebs were trying to be ingratiating to religious people; most of the radio hosts live secular lives in Tel Aviv, and are not fussing over cleaning their houses of leavened bread. The thing is, ingratiation suggests a communal expectation—in this case, that listeners increasingly think of Passover in terms of dietary strictures and ritual symbols, old-style laws, not the move from slavery to emancipation. I know I sound like a Unitarian minister, fresh out of divinity school and perturbed by Christ’s message being eclipsed by Christmas presents. But in Israel, there is an added loss that one may feel at a time like this: the eclipse of a specifically Zionist celebration of emancipation by, of all things, the Jewish state.
Wait, doesn’t Zionism mean putting a kind of defensive shield, military and statist, around Jewish ritual observance? Not the pioneering Zionism of my youth. That Zionism had assumed strictly religious life—especially what was found in Yiddish-speaking heartlands of Eastern Europe, dominated by stern, sentimental attachment to rabbinic law—would be undermined by contact with liberal freedoms. The Zionism I was raised with emphasized individual conscience and artistic license. Zionists argued that to redeem what was wonderful about Jewish civilization—and not everything was—one needed a national home and a Hebrew civil society to hold people together and connect them as freed spirits to an otherwise lost collective past; to replace rabbinic authority with a Hebrew politics, university, farm, press, and concert hall. Otherwise, the whole legacy would disappear—not because places like Russia would not let Jews in but because places like America would.
Jewish life, in this Zionist view, would not be crushed by anti-Semitism, but would slowly evaporate on contact with the modern world (Zionists loved the word “modern”), leaving only a residue of kitsch. Zionists were troubled about Jew-hatred, too, but did not foresee Nazis; nobody in his or her right mind could. Nor did the Holocaust remove from Jews this big choice that Zionists posed from the start, though a generation of horror and Israeli insurgence delayed having to face it. If you are not going to adhere to Orthodox Judaism, the choice would be Hebrew life in a national home or Jewish nostalgia in the diaspora, Yehuda Amichai’s poetry or Adam Sandler’s shtick.
I, for one, made my choice in the late sixties: I escaped a suffocating Montreal synagogue and came to an Israel whose poets used the Torah and prayer book as material; historians took the Enlightenment, with its “science of Judaism,” for granted; kibbutzniks invented a Passover Haggadah full of emancipationist nuance and rites of spring; and Tel Aviv unionists were more likely to have heard of Paul Robeson than Sam Bronfman. Yet I woke up this morning in a Jerusalem whose atmosphere is far more like the place I tried to escape than the one I escaped to. Sixty per cent of first graders are in Orthodox schools of one kind or another, thirty per cent are in Arab schools, and ten per cent are in the kind of secular schools I had thought of as “modern.”
I can’t quite figure out how this happened. Perhaps it was the messianic impulses unleashed by the Six Day War, which colonized Israel, while settlers colonized “Judea and Samaria.” I knew the election of Menachem Begin’s Likud would not end well. Then again, maybe the whole project was too ambitious, much as the flight from Egypt was.
Then, the first generation of freed slaves had to die before the Children of Israel would be worthy of their freedom. But the Prophets were not too complimentary about the people in the land after the second generation died; they had freedom, but demanded a king. Now Israel’s second generation—people like Amichai—is pretty much dead. Draw your own conclusions.
Photograph: Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe/Getty

 

The Keepers of the Stones

 

 Except for a few days a year, you can walk among and touch the stones of Stonehenge only by special arrangement with English Heritage, the quasi-government agency that manages the site. In 2000, the agency began opening the site to the public on the solstices and the equinoxes.

  

Pagans, druids, and other self-styled mystics gather at the site for this year’s vernal equinox, on March 20th, an occasion that drew thousands of visitors. The woman pictured here is a member of a group called the Loyal Arthurian Warband.

  

The crowd at Stonehenge during seasonal transitions includes people dressed in everything from Druidic garb to sporty anoraks, with musicians toting gongs, drums, and, occasionally, the more obscure didgeridoo or concertina. 

  

The man in the white hat on the left is Rollo Maughfling, a Stonehenge veteran who also led some of the ceremonies in December, when, at his request, onlookers delivered “the universal mantra of om” on behalf of such causes as Aboriginal rights, the crisis in Syria, and “nuclear-fuel cores in the sea.”

Salisbury Plain, in England, is known for its concentration of prehistoric structures, most notably Stonehenge, the circle of megaliths famous for the mystery surrounding its purpose. Despite the fickle British weather, including gale-force winds and lashing rains, the photographer George Steinmetz travelled to central England to photograph the stones during the vernal equinox, one of four open-access days during which pilgrims can walk around the site. In this week’s magazine, Laura Miller writes about her experience at Stonehenge on the winter solstice, another open-access day.
Miller explains how, in 2000, English Heritage, the agency that manages Stonehenge, began opening the site to a small group of guests on annual solstices and equinoxes. “The most prominent groups call themselves Druids, after the priestly caste of Iron Age populations in Britain,” Miller writes. “Although modern Druidry can be roughly characterized as revering nature, it has no set rituals or beliefs, and can be customized to suit each practitioner’s preferences. It is a young faith, at best a couple of centuries old, which hankers after an irretrievable, primal past whose most celebrated and mysterious remnant is the prehistoric stone circle on Salisbury Plain.” Modern Druids, with names like the Summoner of the Hearth of the Turning Wheel and the Keeper of the Stones, claim an ancestral connection to the site, much to the chagrin of the archeological community. However, as Miller explains, the disparate groups have something in common. “When an archeologist fits her knees into the depressions left by a Neolithic cook, or a modern-day Druid invokes ancient gods he can never understand in the way that their original worshippers did, both are struggling to connect with an elusive past.”

 

David Byrne's Disco Musical Returns To NYC, And We Couldn't Be Happier

 

NEW YORK (AP) — David Byrne has been thinking a lot about numbers recently.
As in: How many people packed into a room makes it a happy mob? What's the perfect number you need to make them lose their inhibitions and dance? What if there are too many? Too few?
The Talking Heads frontman's preoccupation has been triggered by the reopening of his immersive show "Here Lies Love," which returns this month to the Public Theater downtown.
The exact number of people is important because the show is staged as an interactive disco that charts the rise and fall of Philippine ex-first lady Imelda Marcos. The audience mills around or dances as platforms move and the action switches from one side of the room to the other.
When it was in the Public's LuEsther Hall last year, the show had a capacity of 160. This time, Byrne and a group of commercial producers are hoping to push that number to 200 or so.
"There gets to be a tipping point where a certain number of people become a crowd. I don't know that exact number. I'm sure it has something to do with density," Byrne says. "By increasing the number, we're going to kind of push it further that way and that's going to be great."
Byrne, who teamed up with Fatboy Slim on the music, has been shepherding the show for 10 years, ever since a light bulb went off in his head when he learned about Marcos owning a disco ball.

 

Qatar's Monster Stadium

 

Attention, attention. There's a football stadium in Qatar that looks a lot like female genitalia, and the internet wants you to gawk at it.
Yes, outlets like The Guardian, The Independent and Buzzfeed are aesthetically correct in comparing the Al Wakrah World Cup Stadium design to a vagina. With its labia-like exterior, pinkish coloring and perfectly placed opening, it's easy to see less a state-of-the-art athletic center meant to combat Qatar's scorching summer heat, and more a giant, flowering vagina that only happens to house 40,000 spectators and is part of a $140 billion spending adventure.

 

We'll even give it to Buzzfeed et al for pointing out this hilariously NSFW GIF (clipped from an Al Wakrah Stadium teaser video), which turns the unlucky viewer into a strange sort of architectural voyeur.
But vagina-likenesses aside, the football (read: soccer, if you're in the U.S.) stadium was designed by world-renowned architect Zaha Hadid, a little fact some news outlets left out. Hadid, the first woman to ever win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, who has been included in more art world listicles than we can count on our hands, should not have to see her work reviewed without attribution. No matter how sensual the end product makes us feel.

 

 

Hadid has commented on the "male-dominated" nature of the architecture realm before, so we doubt she'd be happy to see The Guardian misattribute her latest design feat Vagina Stadium to male "bigwigs" (Hadid is a vagina-equipped female).
Essentially, we're glad someone's pinpointed the perfect anatomical parallel to Hadid's admittedly yonic creation, but let's not forget to slap a "Made by Zaha Hadid" label on any assessment. In the end, we can forgive The Guardian because we like this simple explanation:

"In a world where sport and vaginas very rarely come together with such prominence (see every UK female footballer's salary versus every UK male footballer's salary), [the stadium design] can only be a good thing. And after all, why not have 45,000 people crammed inside a woman's reproductive system? It's not like they haven't been there before."

 

By the way, the stadium is actually "inspired by the dhow boat that carried generations of local fishermen and pearl divers" in Qatar, in case you were interested/have stopped staring at the vagina.

 

 

A Giant '100% Organic' Tower Is Coming To New York City

 

The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 has selected The Living’s (David Benjamin) “circular tower of organic and reflective bricks” as winner for the Young Architects Program’s (YAP) 15th edition in New York. An exemplar of the cradle-to-cradle philosophy, the temporary installation will be built using a new method of bio-design that results in a structure made entirely from organic material.
“Hy-Fi” gained distinction with the jury due to the ”mesmerizing” light effects reflected on its interior walls, effects achieved by the unique stacking of two new materials: Ecovative-manufactured organic bricks, made from corn stalks and specially-developed living root structures, and reflective bricks, designed by 3M, that were used as growing trays for the organic bricks before being implemented into the structure. Still prototypes, the reflective bricks will be sent back to D3 for further research upon the installation’s dismantling.

 

MoMA explains: “The organic bricks are arranged at the bottom of the structure and the reflective bricks are arranged at the top to bounce light down on the towers and the ground. The structure inverts the logic of load-bearing brick construction and creates a gravity-defying effect -- instead of being thick and dense at the bottom, it is thin and porous at the bottom."

 The formation is calibrated to create a micro-climate in the summer by drawing in cool air at the bottom and pushing out hot air at the top. This offers a “familiar -- yet completely new -- structure in the context of the glass towers of the New York City skyline and the brick construction of the MoMA PS1 building.”

 

“This year’s YAP winning project bears no small feat. It is the first sizable structure to claim near-zero carbon emissions in its construction process and, beyond recycling, it presents itself as being 100% compostable,” said Pedro Gadanho, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design.
“Recurring to the latest developments in biotech, it reinvents the most basic component of architecture -- the brick -- as both a material of the future and a classic trigger for open-ended design possibilities. At MoMA PS1, The Living’s project will be showcased as a sensuous, primeval background for the Warm-Up sessions; the ideas and research behind it, however, will live on to fulfill ever new uses and purposes.”

 

Kings of Compensation: How the Metropolitan Museum of Art Rewards its Own.

 

Thomas Campbell, who was paid relatively modestly when he took over the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009, has advanced toward the top of the pack.

The Met gave the former tapestry curator a 10 percent raise in 2012, to $1.2 million in salary and benefits, according to its tax return. His compensation bested James Cuno, president and chief executive officer of Los Angeles’ J. Paul Getty Trust, and Ellen Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History, both of whom made about $1.1 million, according their institutions’ most recent disclosures.

Leading the Met, with expenses last season of $344 million, involves intense fundraising, integrating the Whitney Museum space on Madison Avenue, managing 17 curatorial departments, and current and former trustees. “You have to manage down and up equally well,’’ said Sarah James of nonprofit recruiter Phillips Oppenheim.

Campbell’s compensation increase came as the Met’s attendance dipped slightly and the institution reported its first operating loss since 2008-2009. But net assets grew about 11 percent, to $3 billion.

In 2008, when Campbell was a curator for nine months and director-elect for three, he made $246,000. He was bumped up to $1 million for his first full year running the most-visited museum in the US. He’s still behind Glenn Lowry at the Museum of Modern Art, the perennial compensation king, who earned $1.8 million in 2011.

Lowry likely earned even more in 2012. (MoMA’s new tax return is expected in May.) MoMA is a private museum while the Met is one of 33 New York institutions that operate rent-free on city-owned property and receive ongoing municipal support. The packages for Lowry, Campbell, and Met president Emily Rafferty include a housing allowance or rent-free apartment. All entertain for work.

James Abruzzo, a nonprofit recruiter and compensation consultant, said pay has escalated at big cultural organizations partly because of a shortage of qualified, available people to run them. “If demand is high and supply is low, prices go up,’’ he said.

Abruzzo attributed the dearth of experienced leaders in part to a lack of succession planning at organizations. And as trustees make more in their day jobs as chief executives and investment titans, they’re more comfortable approving raises for museum directors. “It’s a really tough job,’’ said Abruzzo, a managing director with recruiter DHR International. “Those who do it well deserve every penny.’’

Harold Holzer, a Met spokesman, said trustees gave raises to Campbell and Rafferty, who earned $885,000 in 2012, because of performance. “They’re expressing their confidence and appreciation,’’ Holzer said in a telephone interview. Holzer, the senior vice president for public affairs, got a 3 percent raise to $476,000, including benefits, in 2012.

Met board chairman Daniel Brodsky, a real estate developer, also leads the museum’s compensation committee. According to the Met’s tax return, an independent consultant annually looks at comparable executives and organizations in making recommendations. Pay is also based on “the market for executive talent,” according to the return.

One of the Metropolitan Museum’s newly reinstalled and renovated European Paintings galleries.
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The fiscal year’s high points included Leonard Lauder’s promised gift of 78 Cubist pictures and the reopening and redesign of 45 Old Master galleries, Campbell and Rafferty wrote in the annual report. There were also infrastructure investments, a new members lounge and digitizing hundreds of Met publications, many out of print, and making them accessible online for free.

Campbell’s compensation increase came as Met attendance dropped slightly (as at MoMA)—to 6.2 million from a record 6.28 million in 2011-12. Comparisons with the previous season are “difficult’’ given the absence of a blockbuster exhibition rivaling the fashion of Alexander McQueen, which was on display in early 2011, the Met said. It also blamed the effect of Hurricane Sandy. Construction of the David H. Koch Plaza, with new fountains and an illuminated façade, may not have helped. “We’ve worked hard to create and maintain inventive, attractive and informative signage but the fact is that a great deal of plaza space is under wraps and we all look forward to the September unveiling,’’ Holzer said.

The museum had an operating deficit of $4.4 million, its first operating loss since 2008-09. Then, the financial crisis decimated its investments by a quarter and the Met fired or bought out 14 percent of staff. Last season, thanks to fundraising and rising markets, net assets jumped by $290 million to $3 billion. (Net assets exclude art.) Suzanne Brenner, the chief investment officer, earned $1.2 million, including a $401,000 bonus and $206,000 in deferred pay from a previous year.

Barbara Dougherty, who worked at the museum for 41 years and retired in February 2012 as chief membership officer, received $1.2 million. That included $1 million in “separation pay,’’ which Holzer said was the cash value of her accumulated pension. Membership has more than doubled since Dougherty became associate manager of the department, in 1979, and dues last season totaled $29 million. Erin Coburn, the chief officer of digital media, also received separation pay—$183,000. She left at the end of 2012 after two and a half years. Sree Sreenivasan was named the Met’s first chief digital officer, a more senior position, at a yet-undisclosed salary, in June 2013.

On October 30 the Met won a victory in New York State Supreme court, when a judge dismissed claims in two lawsuits that the museum’s “recommended’’ admission charges are deceptive—legally, admission is pay-what-you-wish—and violates its lease with the city. Arnold Weiss, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said they’ve appealed. Admissions accounted for $38 million last season, 15 percent of operating revenue. The Met said in its annual report that an adverse outcome in either suit “could be material to the museum.’’

 

 Important Monet Found Among Gurlitt’s Nazi-Era Art Trove, Valued at $13 Million.

 

Claude Monet‘s Waterloo Bridge, London (1903) is the latest famous canvas recovered from Cornelius Gurlitt’s hidden stash of priceless artwork, AFA News reports. The long-lost masterpiece is part of a series the artist did on the subject between 1900 and 1908.

The latest find comes from the reclusive 81-year-old’s third residence in the town of Bad Aussee, in Austria’s Styria region. The 180 artworks include a bronze Pierre-Auguste Renoir sculpture and drawings by Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso. German authorities seized 1,280 works from Gurlitt’s Munich apartment in February 2012, and recovered an additional 60 pieces from a second property in Salzburg, Austria.

At at 2007 Christie’s auction, a similar 1904 Monet from the Waterloo Bridge series sold for £17.9 million ($35.5 million). An early estimate from the Independent pegs the value of the version just recovered in Austria at £8 million ($13.3 million).

According to Sueddeutsche, the painting’s known provenance can be traced back to Paris’s Galerie Durand-Ruel, which sold the work to Berlin’s Paul Cassirer prior to World War I. The painting was likely confiscated from Cassirer’s descendents, as the Jewish dealer and publisher died in 1926.

While artnet News previously reported that a complete inventory of the now-infamous collection will never be publicized, Germany’s Lost Art Database does catalogue those of the works that are suspected of being stolen by Nazis.

Complicating the provenance research are the many pieces that Cornelius Gurlitt’s father, art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, bought legitimately prior to 1933. Despite his Jewish background, the elder Gurlitt was one of three dealers the Nazis authorized to sell so-called “degenerate art” internationally during World War Two. The collector ultimately kept many of the paintings that Jewish collectors were forced to sell to the government.

Investigations by the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives division of the US Army, whose wartime activities protecting European cultural sites and recovering art looted by the Nazis were the subject of the recent George Clooney film, cleared Hildebrand of any wrong doing. Intriguingly, the Gurlitts’ Bad Aussee home, which appears to have been used as a major storage facility by the family as recently as 2012, is quite close to the Altaussee salt mine where the Monuments Men recovered 6,000 stolen artworks hidden by the Nazis.

Although Gurlitt initially maintained his legitimate ownership of the entire collection (see the artnet News report on his official website), he has since promised to return artwork that can be proven to be Nazi war loot. Several pieces have already been the subject of lawsuits from the descendents of the original owners, including a 1901 Max Liebermann canvas. Germany’s Städtische Museum Mainz has also laid claim to 56 of the works held by Gurlitt.

 

Artist Designs Surreal Futuristic Forts That Can Withstand Natural Disaster

 Dauphin Island, located off the coast of Alabama in the Gulf of Mexico, is known for experiencing perpetual and catastrophic hurricanes. When a storm hits the small island of around 1,200 people, it often washes away much of the coastline with it, leaving residents to rebuild their homes again and again following every big storm.
 

Artist Dionisio González became fascinated by this society's ability to endure creation and destruction in such rapid succession, willingly succumbing to the whims of nature's cycles time and time again. The artist, who has always held an interest in architecture, embarked on a mission to design surreal structures that would better suit the fraught island's populous, fusing fantasy with the inhabitants' inevitable reality.
For his series "Dauphin Island," González designed dreamlike, futuristic forts made from iron and concrete, fusing the role of artist with that of architect, engineer and urban planner. The peculiar edifices -- the hybrid of a beach house, a bunker and a space ship -- are as structurally whimsical as they are sustainably sound. With his hypothetical blueprints, González illustrates how the collision of chaos and beauty is a precious site for creativity.
In a second series, "Inter-Action," González crafted a fictional environment in which natural resources become physically indispensable to "manmade" buildings. Grafting his structures to their natural surroundings, González renders a fictional world in which natural and urban environments are not just in harmony, but are actually fused together. Purely through creating images, González offers up the potential of shifting the established order of things, thus opening up the future to the possibility of change.

 

Naked Man Strikes Goddess Pose In Front Of Botticelli Painting 

 Museum-goers were treated to a shocking display at Florence's Uffizi Gallery on Saturday when a visitor stripped naked before Sandro Botticelli's "Birth of Venus."
As the naked man faced the Botticelli painting, he struck the same pose as the goddess depicted in the 15th-century work. He then scattered rose petals around him and took a knee in front of the famous artwork, according to local reports.
Visitors to the Italian museum captured photos of the scene, which may be best described as an unexpected piece of performance art. It wasn't long before the images were widely shared on social media.